Plumber in West Village

Two hundred years of alterations

The West Village holds the oldest residential building stock in this part of Manhattan. Narrow two and three bay houses, three or four stories over a basement, built well before indoor plumbing existed. Everything to do with water in these houses has been added, and most of it has been added more than once.

The practical consequence is that no two are alike. A house on Bethune and a house on Charles, built the same decade by the same kind of builder, can have completely different pipework because they were divided and renovated at different times by different people.

What comes up

• Abandoned pipework in the walls. Layers of work from every era, much of it dead. Establishing what is live is a real part of the job here and not a formality
• Very tight routes. Narrow houses, narrow stairs, low cellars, and often no way to get a run where it ought to go
• Shallow cellars below the sewer, with the drainage consequences that brings. See sump pumps and cellar drainage
• Small buildings, shared everything. A house divided into four apartments has one service, one house drain and frequently one water heater arrangement, and any work affects everybody
• Original cast iron house drains under a cellar floor that nobody wants to break. See camera inspection before deciding anything

The landmarking, in practical terms

Almost all of this is inside the Greenwich Village Historic District. Internal work is generally unaffected, but anything touching the facade, the areaway, the roofline or anything else visible from a street is subject to review. Vent terminations and external pipe routes are the two that catch people out.

The street grid

Worth a practical note. Where West 4th crosses West 10th, and where Waverly meets Waverly, addresses are genuinely ambiguous. When you call, the cross street is more useful than the number, and for anything urgent it is the thing that gets someone to the right door first time.

Where we cover

West of Seventh Avenue down to Christopher and across to the river: Bleecker, Hudson, Bank, Perry, Charles, Jane, Horatio and Bethune, Abingdon Square and the blocks toward the Meatpacking District.